An indirect causal model of alcohol's effect on human affect is proposed. Alcohol is argued to enhance affect - and thus become reinforcing - by interfering with higher cognitive processes so that attention becomes restricted to dominant, preferred responses and diverted from sources of affective distress. In this way, drinking is reasoned to reduce both the distress arising from conflicting response tendencies (by disinhibiting the dominant tendency) and general affective distress, when it coexists with a pleasant dominant response activity to which attention can be diverted. These two conditions in which drinking is reasoned to be reinforcing are also hypothesized to stimulate drinking. Four laboratory experiments and one field study are proposed to test these predictions and to determine the degree to which the predicted effects are mediated by drinking expectancies, drinking habits, and situationally relevant individual difference variables.